“The most advanced spyware can turn your smartphone into a spy in your pocket,” observes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow in this shocking documentary. He spent two years investigating how surveillance software is being used in 45 countries.
He goes to Israel to interview technicians and salespeople at the NSO Group which makes the popular Pegasis program. It is being employed by governments, companies, and individuals to extract data from smartphones including calls, messages, emails, and whatever the phone’s camera and microphone have access to. And this is not just a tool of terrorists or criminals. It’s even being used in Western democracies. Ron Feibert of the Citizen Lab in Toronto, who have investigated this technology, notes: “Authoritarian practices are spreading worldwide. I firmly believe the surveillance industry, unchecked as it is, is one of the major contributing factors to those trends.”
In one very troubling segment, Farrow interviews a man whose phone was hacked and then learned that the phones of all his family members’ phones have been hacked. Is this something we can all expect? We can’t put this genie back in the bottle, and it is getting more powerful by the moment.
Farrow asks, “Should we be concerned?” The answer: “Definitely yes."